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Koru and Bridge

The Koru

There is a learning to be had from the koru, the native New Zealand fern. When it is young, its fronds are tightly-curled into a spiral shape or koru.

In Io Matua Kore, the ancient Māori spiritual teachings, the koru has a wonderful story to share. The shape of the frond and its unfurling is a metaphor for the soul’s journey and indeed for our human journey.

In our infancy we begin at the centre and move outwards along the spiral, gathering knowledge and experience as we go. No experience is wasted, since each one adds to the sum total of who we are at that point on the spiral of our journey.

The koru thus tells us that our journeys are not linear timelines, not straight lines with our birth at one end and our crossing at the other. Rather we walk a spiral, expanding ever outwards as we grow. Notice, too, how the spiral eventually leads us back to the Earth, our Mother.

If we draw an imaginary line across the koru of our lives and label it, for example, relationships, and then reflect upon that aspect of our life journey, we will see that we meet the same challenges again and again. Each time, however, the experience is different, because we have the benefit of prior learning to help us.

The Bridge or Aniwaniwa

What could be more beautiful or fascinating than a rainbow, or aniwaniwa?

We all know that it isn’t really there, that we cannot touch it. As we approach it, the rainbow moves away or disappears. Yet we can see it from certain angles or positions. Our eyes tell us it is real. In a way the rainbow is a metaphor for our soul, shining, real, but impossible to touch, to hold in our hands.

White light is split into its components, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, and for the time that the rainbow's gentle curve is visible to us, we see the whole as the sum of its parts. It appears to join sky and land, just as we do. Its feet are on the Earth; its head is in the sky.

It is a bridge, a reminder in a visual metaphor that body and mind are intertwined, that land and sky are interlinked and interdependent, but that the soul, while impossible to quantify or touch, will endure.